"It'll hold."
Austin got the news that afternoon, standing in the hallway outside the courthouse with his phone pressed to his ear, listening to a colleague read him the new charge sheet line by line.
"They added obstruction," he said, walking back into his office where Nathan sat waiting, finally out on a supervised release Austin had fought two days to secure. "Federal obstruction, tied to the classified nature of the cargo."
Nathan's hands tightened on the arms of his chair. "They're using the shipment against me? The same shipment their own officer broke into?"
"That's exactly what they're doing." Austin sat down across from him, voice steady, even though his eyes carried real anger behind them. "They're betting that if this looks complicated enough—enough charges, enough confusion—it buys them room to slow everything down. Muddy water instead of clean water."
"So what do we do?"
"We push harder, not softer." Austin pulled out his laptop, already typing. "I'm filing for an emergency hearing. I want this in front of a judge as fast as I can get it there, before they have time to build out whatever narrative they're constructing around this new charge."
Nathan sat back, exhaustion pulling at the edges of everything he said. "I did nothing wrong. I sat there and told the truth the whole time, and now I'm the one who put a classified shipment at risk."
"I know." Austin didn't try to soften it, because there wasn't a soft way to say what came next. "And I know how backwards it feels. But this is what they do, Nathan. When the truth doesn't protect them anymore, they don't disappear; they twist. It's the last card they have left to play. And it's an ugly one, but it's not a strong one. That footage still exists. That footage doesn't care what new charge sits next to it."
Nathan nodded slowly, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders, even if not all of it.
Austin kept typing, jaw tight with focus. "I'm requesting the hearing for next week. Fastest I can push it without the request looking desperate. We show that footage to a judge, plain and unedited, and no amount of obstruction language changes what everybody's going to see with their own eyes."
"And if it's not enough?"